(Freed) Dobbie vs Q; who would win?
Star Trek: Picard
- Thread starter SHIELD Agent 47
- Start date
A thought regarding Seven: we've seen that there are three ways to get into Starfleet.
1) Go to Starfleet Academy. This is the path most officers take, though the problem is that the Academy only accepts the best and the brightest (as we saw with Wesley; most candidates have to apply multiple times before they successfully get in), and non-Federation citizens (like Nog) have to be sponsored.
2) Enlist. This will get you into the fleet, but you will not be a commissioned officer. This is the path Chief O'Brien took (he was Chief Petty Officer on DS9, and noted that a fresh-out-of-the-Academy ensign outranked him).
3) Join an equivalent organization recognized by Starfleet, rise through the ranks, and transfer over. We saw this in DS9 when Kira went from a Bajoran Colonel to a Starfleet Commander, and in Lower Decks, when T'Lyn transferred from the Vulcan Expeditionary Fleet to Starfleet. Presumably, Janeway forged an ad-hoc equivalency agreement with the Maquis off-camera when Voyager was stranded, allowing Chakotay's crew to transfer over with their ranks intact (probably facilitated by Chakotay already running his crew to a formal standard).
For Seven, it's possible the Fenris Rangers were such an organization, in which case her previous status as an agent would have a bearing on her Starfleet rank.
1) Go to Starfleet Academy. This is the path most officers take, though the problem is that the Academy only accepts the best and the brightest (as we saw with Wesley; most candidates have to apply multiple times before they successfully get in), and non-Federation citizens (like Nog) have to be sponsored.
2) Enlist. This will get you into the fleet, but you will not be a commissioned officer. This is the path Chief O'Brien took (he was Chief Petty Officer on DS9, and noted that a fresh-out-of-the-Academy ensign outranked him).
3) Join an equivalent organization recognized by Starfleet, rise through the ranks, and transfer over. We saw this in DS9 when Kira went from a Bajoran Colonel to a Starfleet Commander, and in Lower Decks, when T'Lyn transferred from the Vulcan Expeditionary Fleet to Starfleet. Presumably, Janeway forged an ad-hoc equivalency agreement with the Maquis off-camera when Voyager was stranded, allowing Chakotay's crew to transfer over with their ranks intact (probably facilitated by Chakotay already running his crew to a formal standard).
For Seven, it's possible the Fenris Rangers were such an organization, in which case her previous status as an agent would have a bearing on her Starfleet rank.
Picard outright gave Seven a field commission at the end of Season Two. That could also be considered valid.
1. There is a lot of time between the seasons. Several years in fact, and there little girl has grown up. On Twitter the show runner explained that the Rikers' daughter was at Star Fleet Academy.
I wonder if that means that she will show up in Legacy if they ever get around to green lighting what the fans have been pleading for.
IIRC Season 3 was supposed to be in 2403 or something (to justify Jack's age, Picard's second retirement, Seven being aboard Titan rather than Stargazer, etc), but then someone decided to awkwardly shoehorn it into 2401 to line Frontier Day up with the first episode of Enterprise.
The big sticking point is that flashback of Jean-Luc at Guinan's bar "five years ago" --which now would have been in 2396, when Jean-Luc was A) a bitter recluse and B) hadn't been to Guinan's bar (whereas a later setting would have had it be during his tenure as Academy headmaster post-S1, making it more reasonable that a gaggle of cadets would know where to go to interrupt his lunch).
It's odd, I hadn't even thought about how the flashback was so specific. For Picard to be old, happy to carry on about Starfleet values and the value of a crew, but still weirdly dismissive of biological family after his own various family troubles, it'd have to happen in between S1 and S2, and then there's the bar thing on top. You know I really prefer to just pretend that Picard spent a bunch of years that way too.
Meanwhile Raffi's story just gets more depressing if the gap is longer. It's really becoming the one decision I think S3 completely dropped the ball on, that she should have been Worf's protege the entire time and only the family stuff would be her "want" at the beginning (which is of course the thing fixed at the end by Worf exposing her.)
Oh yeah, I have no doubt he was on the other side of the teletype machine. But nothing's changed my opinion since we were watching it the first time that Raffi's isolation and lack of resources at the start was ridiculous bathos and there was simply no reason not to jump straight to the two of them having been working together on this case for months. The teletype BS, and Starfleet not taking Raffi seriously again after the first time she saved the universe, serves no purpose. She's on the verge of losing it when we meet her, and a Starfleet that treats its operatives that way is a maliciously ineffective one like we were shown in S1. She is almost literally a gig worker driving her own car.
Skip it, and you'd have Worf already mentoring her and her already playing the snarky teenager about it, the two of them already getting around on a shuttle with a cloak instead of Raffi driving a hand-me-down, and Starfleet already taking their own intel seriously. Nothing about that situation is harder to explain in media res than the situation Raffi is in at the start of the season as presented. Arguably it's much easier, since the lack of human contact, a ship, and Starfleet doing their jobs are all conspicuous things that have to be set up in their own right.
You'd still have the Worf saves the day reveal, even if it had to be in the same scene after we're reintroduced to Raffi and she reveals that she's actually Starfleet intelligence - which would itself actually be a contrast to S1 showing Starfleet did have her back this time. Raffi could still be desperate about trying to prevent the terrorism, and still pained by having to keep her work secret from her family, just not to the point of affecting her mental health in ways that Starfleet is consistently attentive to in its personnel in every other situation we've seen.
Everything worth keeping is still on the table, and it would have been the natural and straightest-line approach to that plot, so I don't know why they went so far out of their way to clever it up and make it less good.
I still think the first two episodes are not just the weakest of the season but actively bad, and about half of that problem goes away if Raffi's setup makes sense. If instead the gap between seasons is years instead of months, it just makes Starfleet look several times as incompetent.
Skip it, and you'd have Worf already mentoring her and her already playing the snarky teenager about it, the two of them already getting around on a shuttle with a cloak instead of Raffi driving a hand-me-down, and Starfleet already taking their own intel seriously. Nothing about that situation is harder to explain in media res than the situation Raffi is in at the start of the season as presented. Arguably it's much easier, since the lack of human contact, a ship, and Starfleet doing their jobs are all conspicuous things that have to be set up in their own right.
You'd still have the Worf saves the day reveal, even if it had to be in the same scene after we're reintroduced to Raffi and she reveals that she's actually Starfleet intelligence - which would itself actually be a contrast to S1 showing Starfleet did have her back this time. Raffi could still be desperate about trying to prevent the terrorism, and still pained by having to keep her work secret from her family, just not to the point of affecting her mental health in ways that Starfleet is consistently attentive to in its personnel in every other situation we've seen.
Everything worth keeping is still on the table, and it would have been the natural and straightest-line approach to that plot, so I don't know why they went so far out of their way to clever it up and make it less good.
I still think the first two episodes are not just the weakest of the season but actively bad, and about half of that problem goes away if Raffi's setup makes sense. If instead the gap between seasons is years instead of months, it just makes Starfleet look several times as incompetent.
Yeah, but unlike other modern Trek shows, those bread crumbs matter somewhat. The changling infiltration didn't happen overnight. The isolation and compartmentalized communication between assets was intentional and all coordinated by Ro. The less Raffi knew the better. Now it might have been better to extrapolate on that but I think the implication was that she was one of many such operatives that weren't interacting with Starfleet as a whole and why Worf wanted her to leave stuff alone until ordered otherwise to maintain that "off the grid" interaction.
I really think that you can cut out all the Raffi/Worf scenes until they communicate with Picard and Riker and have a much better show. To be honest I think those were the worst parts of this season.
True. I guess in retrospect it makes sense. Maybe we've just had so much of that garbage that it felt like the norm so it didn't feel like it was leading anywhere to me, and I just thought it was Picard S1 Starfleet back on their bullshit.
NX-01
1701
1701-A
1701-B
1701-C
1701-D
1701-E
1701-F
1701-G
1701-J
32nd Century Enterprise
Is a prefix something that goes after? I have always called that a suffix. If that's what he means, then yes, knocking the first two off for no real reason other than to make G the 7th does make G the 7th...
Suffix.
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Enterprise E was a warship that inherited the crew of the D, a transition that only happened before with the NCC-1701 to the A, and that was with the same class of ship. In the case of the E, it was a new class simply because Starfleet was undergoing a lot of major changes at the time. We know much less about the F. We can guess that it looks a little less aggressive than the E and the class is "Odyssey" rather than "Sovereign" so perhaps it reflects a shift back away from the more martial-seeming E. But while the timeline is unclear, it had to come pretty quick on the heels of the E's destruction.
The Enterprise-J from ENT doesn't have to exist because timeline shenanigans, and because it was an extremely minor detail, and god help us if it had the same awful set design whenever it appeared again. But if it did exist, contra First Contact, we're starting to run out of letters in the alphabet.
It's super sus to (re)name a ship Enterprise and hope that everyone recognizes it as an homage to the crew of the Enterprise D. But you're right, giving the name to a tough little ship that's just out there doing the job really is a very nice change of pace. Maybe some other name takes over now as the obligatory flagship name, with tours of duty that don't necessarily have to pick up where the last one left off. Apparently Voyager-B showed up on a viewscreen once and we know it makes it to J over the next seven hundred years or so.
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It feels like they're putting a finger in the dyke of obligatory Enterprise flagships, doesn't it? The NX Enterprise was all but a prototype shakedown cruise. The NCC-1701 Enterprise was a ship of the line and the best the fleet had to offer, but not officially any different from the other twelve ships in its class or whatnot. The B, C, and D all seemed to have been named for the exploratory NCC-1701 and -A, but had a more diplomatic role, including one called an Ambassador class. Even so, there's a 20 year gap from C to D, and 50 years between the launches of the B and the C.
Enterprise E was a warship that inherited the crew of the D, a transition that only happened before with the NCC-1701 to the A, and that was with the same class of ship. In the case of the E, it was a new class simply because Starfleet was undergoing a lot of major changes at the time. We know much less about the F. We can guess that it looks a little less aggressive than the E and the class is "Odyssey" rather than "Sovereign" so perhaps it reflects a shift back away from the more martial-seeming E. But while the timeline is unclear, it had to come pretty quick on the heels of the E's destruction.
The Enterprise-J from ENT doesn't have to exist because timeline shenanigans, and because it was an extremely minor detail, and god help us if it had the same awful set design whenever it appeared again. But if it did exist, contra First Contact, we're starting to run out of letters in the alphabet.
It's super sus to (re)name a ship Enterprise and hope that everyone recognizes it as an homage to the crew of the Enterprise D. But you're right, giving the name to a tough little ship that's just out there doing the job really is a very nice change of pace. Maybe some other name takes over now as the obligatory flagship name, with tours of duty that don't necessarily have to pick up where the last one left off. Apparently Voyager-B showed up on a viewscreen once and we know it makes it to J over the next seven hundred years or so.
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I'm glad you mentioned "the 12 ships". In tos it was never explicitly stated but the entire Starfleet (which wasn't even it's name sometimes) was comprised of 12 identical ships and that was it. There were other "spaceships" in the series but the only "Starships" were the Enterprise, etc.
And in those cases they were mostly regarded as an Earth based organization that interacted with aliens rather than the "United Federation of Planets" that we came to know and/or love.
I don't know if this is covered in various media, but all the stuff that we consider what Starfleet and the Federation is now was just added to and retconned over the years.
But if you go watch tos with a blank slate and as it existed in a total vacuum you'll see what I'm talking about.
And in those cases they were mostly regarded as an Earth based organization that interacted with aliens rather than the "United Federation of Planets" that we came to know and/or love.
I don't know if this is covered in various media, but all the stuff that we consider what Starfleet and the Federation is now was just added to and retconned over the years.
But if you go watch tos with a blank slate and as it existed in a total vacuum you'll see what I'm talking about.
New Jersey is one now! X ]
Edit: The above sentence no longer makes any sense, there was a post in between once.
Edit: The above sentence no longer makes any sense, there was a post in between once.
And the Enterprise was said to be among the first generation of warp drive ships at one point, and a lot of basic things like what year it is and what the parts of the ship do weren't decided until TMP or TNG. TAS and TWoK show us two very different ideas of what the rest of the fleet looks like, and the latter one stuck and expanded from there. But the 12 ships line fits pretty easily into the retcon as just referring to the Constitution class, which is the prestige class of the time, if only Discovery hadn't insisted on making every single ship it introduced bigger. In any case, I do think it's fair to say that they were collectively the best of the fleet, but Enterprise itself wasn't singled out as special in any way, and the cache of the name comes from the accomplishments of Kirk and his crew.
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